The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In a process called “mipping” or sub-sampling, a lower resolution version of a visual scene is created. This may be performed in order to use less memory when viewing a complicated scene from a distance. There may be multiple levels of mipping. For example, in one form, four adjacent pixel colors are joined together to make one pixel having an average color of the four original pixels while in another form nine pixels are joined together to make one pixel having an average color of the nine original pixels.
In the use of Infrared (IR) materials, however, pixels are processed differently according to a concept known as “Material Coded Imagery” (MCI) which uses codes to represent different types of materials having different IR properties. Mipping in the infrared does not combine/average different pixel colors as with visual mipping, but derives a single “material code” out of a set of known material codes having suitable properties that an infrared heating and image generation (sensor simulation) system uses to produce an image that looks correct from a distance and that can change into the individual elements as the view becomes closer.